


Maiden, Maker, Monster

by Chloe_at_Eleusis



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen, Maiden, Minotaur - Freeform, Monster - Freeform, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Nonromance, Other, hero - Freeform, maze
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-13 16:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chloe_at_Eleusis/pseuds/Chloe_at_Eleusis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariadne is maiden, maker, monster—sometimes all at once—to the six men she saves. Just as well: None of them are heroes. ::GENFIC--pairings are NOT romantic.::</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maiden, Maker, Monster

**Author's Note:**

> Don't own, not mine, no money.

**COBB**

Ariadne’s Minotaur is the same as Cobb’s: Dom Cobb.

He is his own monster. Even if no-one but she knows its face, everyone can hear the echoes of its breathing, trailing them like footsteps along the narrow ways they walk. Anyone with eyes—and the inception team’s are sharper than most—could see the slow roil of it beneath the uneasy waters of Cobb’s conscious mind.

None of the team are easy, none simple—not even Ariadne herself. The men see little of her complexity; like all good artists, she learned to mask the maze of her mind long before she was taught to hide the edges of a dream. But Cobb is the most torn of them, the most obviously and violently split. Ariadne knows of, can imagine, no-one else who could be at once Theseus and Minotaur.

Minotaur, because it is his guilt that stalks him, whatever face he chooses for it. Theseus, because he has his eyes fixed on the horizon, on a shining ideal that no-one else on the team can match: His love for his children is a fire in him. Ariadne knows she will be consumed—and then discarded on his way home.

She follows Cobb to the center of the labyrinth anyway.

 

**ARTHUR**

Ariadne wishes she’d had more to do with Arthur’s safety.

The point man is the stuff of girlish daydreams—tall, dark, handsome, intelligent, laconic… Cold. He burns with cold, Arthur; his kiss left her both amused at his sense of humor and amazed that her lips weren’t numb. He too was amused; he does show the occasional flash of humor, of gentleness—the shards of a gentleman lurking beneath the clean, spare lines of the perfectly-pressed killer.

Those flashes may well be part of his allure—of which he is very conscious. He wields that appeal too deliberately, with timing too felicitous, for it to be ingenuous—no-one with his degree of tactical intelligence would neglect such an obvious maneuver. Even recognizing it for the stratagem it is doesn’t arm Ariadne against his potent charm.

She has never before been partial to soldiers, but she likes Arthur—likes this icily efficient, quick-thinking guardian who so readily follows his prince into Minos’ labyrinth, who enforces so well the logic of the quest.

It is the labyrinth she builds in Arthur’s image, and not Ariadne, that saves him. That will have to be enough.

 

**EAMES**

Ariadne hopes Eames never talks straight to her.

It would ruin him. There are gods and monsters and heroes in this quest of theirs, but Eames is the labyrinth itself: Twisting, improbable connections and impossible branchings, paradox everywhere; a maze that looks like one thing while being another, yet still contains the whole. It doesn’t escape her notice that it was he who gave them the final shape of their task. 

It would wreck the very essence of the man for him to utter his thoughts in a direct fashion more than occasionally. The straight paths of a maze are always the most dangerous; it is only in anger that Eames is straightforward. She understands and appreciates him more than the rest of the team can, she thinks. Who better to understand a labyrinth than one whose métier is the maze?

Her gaze on Eames is hungry. She’s not certain she’ll ever be able to make anything this complex, but it won’t stop her from trying.

 

**YUSUF**

Ariadne wishes she could have met Yusuf in some other setting.

He seems somewhat hapless compared to the men she follows further downward, with their sharply-cut jawlines and steely gazes and glinting guns. Ariadne, for all her scintillating imagination, can picture Yusuf with none of those.

But if she’d met him at the university… She has a weakness for brilliant men. There aren’t too many doctors of pharmacology who can run their own experiments as well as operating a business on the wrong side of the law, all the while building the kind of chemical scaffolding that the inception team needs. He is a Renaissance man, designer and scientist and scholar and thief, invisible in the elegance of a finished structure which would be impossible without him. Ariadne the architect is familiar with that sort of invisibility.

Yusuf made her labyrinth possible. She will not allow him to emerge from it alone.

 

**ROBERT**

Ariadne wishes Robert had stayed unconscious in Limbo.

He woke there to the sound of her reassurances; to her voice, not her face. His first sight of her betrayed that comfort.

Ariadne’s face, to Robert Fischer, is inextricable from the horror of that churning plummet. The terror in his eyes as they opened—the childlike, helpless scream unvoiced as their gazes caught in his fathomless fall—will stay with her until she dies.

She kicked him off that crumbling balcony to save him, but it doesn’t matter. For her, the uncomprehending fear of an innocent betrayed will always wear wide-set, ice-blue eyes.

For him, too, she is a fixture. Now and forever, Ariadne will be a nightmare to him, the face of the sickening jolt that sends him gasping from nightmare to wakefulness.

It will be a long time before she stops startling awake to the sight of Robert’s terror.

 

**SAITO**

Ariadne wonders if Minos bled like Saito: mortal, yet unassailable by fatigue or fear of death.

It is not only his own blood that he disregards. He has ordered the deaths of many; has set and shaped traps and traducements for his enemies. Has punished even those who aid him, if that aid required betrayal of those with whom they were first allied. In more macabre moods, she wonders if he drowned Nash after his betrayal of Cobb and Arthur, as Minos drowned the princess Scylla.

With Saito she is less Ariadne than with any of the others. She is instead his maze-maker, his Daedalus, and like that first brilliant labyrinth-builder she is wise enough to fear the day his gaze falls solely upon her.

She holds the fates of the men she’s saved in her small hands, firm as a ball of string; but still Ariadne cannot decide whether it will be worse to see in Saito’s implacable stare that her use is over, or that it has only begun.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: My first fic/drabble in this fandom. I would really appreciate any thoughts you choose to share.


End file.
